Pac-Man plus pain

You really don't want to die in this game

Somehow the threat that your mouse or gamepad might buzz feebly in your hands at any time doesn’t inspire a deep and primal fear in most gamers. Now scientists at the Wellcome Trust in London want to change that.

They are monitoring how the human brain responds to real danger by trying to get test subjects to engage in games as instinctively as they engage in real-life situations. So they created a Pac-Man style maze game for them to play with a slight catch: if they die in the game, they’re electrocuted in real life.